Amici write to urge the court to adopt a test that will not impede journalist’s use of the Internet to report news, by limiting their constitutional protections when they publish there. They ask that this Court to find that people who publish in online news sources are subject to the same constitutional protections under the reporter’s shield as reporters who publish in traditional media, and urge this Court to adopt the functional test articulated in Shoen v. Shoen, 5 F. 3d 1289, 1293 (9th, 1993) which asks whether the reporter had “the intent to use materials—sought, gathered, or received—to disseminate information to the public and [whether] such intent existed at the inception of the newsgathering process.”

This is the heart of the friend of the court brief that was filed today by Lauren Gelman of the Stanford Law School Clinical Education Center for Internet & Society's Cyberlaw Clinic. Our client, the Media Bloggers Association, was among the parties joining in this brief and requesting permission to argue it before the Supreme Court.